


An Illustrator's Perspective on Metaphor

by tnico



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Meta, Writing, artist meta, hokusai can hang, symbol drawing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:10:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26280130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tnico/pseuds/tnico
Summary: from my tumblr in response to a writing advice post!i'm always a bit self-conscious about speaking authoritatively on writing, given i've only ever had fellow fans and rpers tell me i'm particularly good at it, but i CAN speak authoritatively about illustrating!! so i thought it might be useful here for anyone interested.UPDATE: chapter 2: weird japanese shit; or, an illustration of the moon stylized as a tit
Kudos: 6





	1. Chapter 1

i usually hold off on unsolicited writing advice bc i’m not published or nothin’ but i would like to put my two cents in on metaphors!

i’ve found you CAN use metaphors-- all the metaphors you want, without toeing the line into what would be a florid use of metaphors in any case-- provided you just use _your_ metaphor.

people tend to have a sort of internal, stock library of phrasing they draw upon, based on just what everyone else is using contemporarily. that _can_ kill the impact! it’s a delicate balance of swathing the audience in the comfort of the familiar whilst tempting them forward with the allure of the novel. 

(there’s also the kind of character you’re writing in mind; i tend to lean heavier on more standardized language in the metaphor imagery of more conventional characters and vice versa. it’s also a GREAT place to sneak in some world-building, lore-building, AND character-building by taking a metaphor and [juxtaposing it in the format the audience would recognize and relate to whatever you’re talking about](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FamousFamousFictional).)

in the art world this is something we call symbol drawing! it’s basically where the brain gets lazy and replaces the thing you see with the bare minimum needed to convey it, and then when you draw upon to to convey it you can only provide that pared down bare minimum. the example i like to use is the eternal assertion of amateur artists that the [eye is shaped like a football](https://www.google.com/search?q=eye+clipart&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwitvvTYi87rAhU1AzQIHUvkAykQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=eye+clipart&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzIHCAAQsQMQQzIECAAQQzIECAAQQzIECAAQQzIECAAQQzICCAAyAggAMgIIADICCAAyAggAOgQIIxAnOgUIABCxA1DKF1igIGDWV2gAcAB4AIABY4gB3gWSAQE4mAEAoAEBqgELZ3dzLXdpei1pbWfAAQE&sclient=img&ei=wnVRX63VFrWG0PEPy8iPyAI&bih=754&biw=1536&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS832US832), because it IS, in the platonic ideal of a spread eye that gets pushed into your brain for what “eye” is, but out in real life it’s going be a triangle more than anything like, most of the time.

(and again let me say, symbol drawing has its PLACE. i personally have a simple trick for drawing backgrounds or graphics i need to be effective but simple: take what you’re trying to draw, and google it + clipart. what you get will look terrible! yes! it’s appealing to the broadest demographic, which is by necessity the lowest demographic! but that’s the power of clip art to an artist. there will be unifying elements within them, and if you can pin those down, and then do them but _well_ , your power is unlocked!

entirely artist-based note, hello my fellows: if you need a quick shorthand for machinery or something complicated in the background the clipart trick is _super_ useful. yeah, you could do the symbolic paring down yourself, but if you don’t _need_ to, why bother?)

but! the same way that examining the stock symbol drawing images unlocks the mechanism for conveying the object with your superior skills, examining the metaphor your brain first urges you to use, picking it apart, and re-purposing the bones into a shape more suited to your character makes a fresh and personalized spin that adds a lot of personality to your POV writing!

one method you can do is say “if this stock or generic metaphor was deleted from the world, how would this character describe the thing through impromptu metaphor”? the other method you can use for inspiration is grabby little hands over pre-existing history, grabby grab grab.

when i can’t figure out a new or interesting way to convey a metaphor, one of the things i do is check it out! the etymology, the origins. previous and historical versions are good too, as well as local variations and rarer ones! it really juices up the brain.

and when you find a historical or previous metaphor you like, save it! or write it down somewhere. i’ve re-used metaphors in different categories shamelessly! off the top of my head, i took ‘tight like a tick’, an archaic simile for being drunk, and slipped it into:

> “The man's nearly vibrating by the time Lambert washes down the bread with his drink, while trying very, very hard to appear casually disaffected. "--Will it?" he prompts, tone stretched taut like a tick. Sounds about as blood-hungry for it, too, Lambert notes.”

does it respect the original context? no. is it a good and effective line? i think so. so mine now, grabby grab.

and above all else, when it comes to metaphor-- when it comes to the english LANGUAGE, let me say-- above all else, don’t be afraid! you want to know why? because shakespeare was NOT.

(i’m writing about writing, of course i’m going to tie it back to my boy shakes-p, look, if you’re following my blog you know who i fucking am,)

one thing i feel like people need to start hammering in more is just how very much language shakespeare just fucking MADE UP. he worked on the philosophy of “it works, it sounds good, it tracks”.

he was hugely formative on the english language because he never, ever stopped tossing the rules and innovating! he saw the big, sprawling mess that is the english language and said “well if that’s the mess i’m dealing with, then i am to be a dog in this mud puddle, i am going to be rolling in it, exulting in it, it y’all ain’t following no sensible rules in the first place then I AIN’T EITHER” and dove in head-first.

when people say shakespeare mastered the english language, they don’t mean ‘he paid tribute to the english language before him’. they _mean_ “willy shakes made english his bitch, and they damn well fucking thanked him for it.”

anyway! metaphors are great! just make them _yours_. be like shakespeare. english is your bitch.


	2. weird japanese shit; or, an illustration of the moon, stylized as a tit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> just some thoughts reposted from my tumblr

i’ve referenced previously the admiration i have for the japanese entertainment industry! as someone who hopes to self-support off of making niche entertainment one day, there’s a clear cultural ethos that allows creators to take risks and try out the weirder concept that’s truly enviable from over in the states.

the appreciation of the interesting, even if it doesn’t actually make sense, allows a much more generous willingness to let weird shit ride from higher-up that’s-- hoo, boyee, imagine trying to pitch literally anything nasu touched to a roomful of hollywood types lmao you’d get two sentences in and then well. that dbz movie sure was. a thing.

but i’ve been thinking about why in more depth and detail japan allows itself, despite being quite well known as a buttoned tight-type of culture, to get so much stranger and more interesting than the stuff that comes out of the western mainstream gristmill. and i think i have a theory for it that, well! it sure makes sense to me, so i thought i’d share it with you.

the thesis itself, the rest being my wandering kibbitzes: japanese people invented true illustration before pretty much anybody else. if you understand how illustration works, it’s ‘anything is possible within the illustration so long as it shows it’s conforming to a firm internal logic, outside the realm of ours’. with that in mind, seeing the weirder japanese stories as _illustrations_ rather than stories as we tend to conceive them here in the west makes it a lot less ‘why do final fantasy games get so weird and high concept’ and more ‘well it clearly is taken to make sense in-story so let’s roll with it because it looks like it’s headed somewhere interesting’.

now onto the nattering! this is already going to be Deep Nico Lore so lmao no need to stick around but *goggles on* *straps in* here we go,

as an illustrator myself, i also have a great admiration for traditional japanese art-- as in, not modern traditional, but the ukiyo-e postcards they were popping out way back in the 1800′s. 

japan always had a very strong art aesthetic that was the sort of self-assured, firmly stylized we call ‘primitive/tribal art’ if they’re browner lmao but dogg mister whitey white boy ruhyeeel art culture-man if it was primitive _there wouldn’t be clearly delineated rules_ to make that very specific ‘style’ _everyone in that culture taps into_. if ALL of them are making the same-looking kind of art, it’s actually highly sophisticated.

there’s also materials to account for! it simply just was _easier_ to carve hyper-realistic busts and statues out of good marble, and _easier_ to have access to drafting tools, not so much because the romans were any better at sculpting then say, your average olmec, but because _YO_ italy’s got itself marble and chalk hand-over-fist. 

so japan got good paper _way_ early in the art game, which is just transformative to any cultural art! (look up[ ledger art ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ledger_art)for a real-time example! it’s basically native americans going ‘HOLY SHIT ART IS SO MUCH EASIER WITH THIS PAPER STUFF’) so they were quite uniquely advantaged in developing the art of illustration waaaaaay before anyone in the western world even got the idea.

when i say ‘illustration’, i’m talking as an art student! basically, an illustration is a figurative drawing. it’s not necessarily stylized-- it can even be based off of live models-- but it’s the artist trying to create a fully-formed image from within their own head, rather than attempting to commit reality to paper.

there’s a reason why japanese people hold hokusai up as one of The Greats, and it’s not just because of that one wave. what made hokusai _The Great_ is the same thing that made [kamal al-din bezhad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kam%C4%81l_ud-D%C4%ABn_Behz%C4%81d) (luminary of persion miniatures) A Great: they not only mastered the art form, but elevated it through their own style and changed it forevermore.

in hokusai’s case, he was perhaps the first to introduce to the system the idea of an internal logic. he could get as figurative as he liked, because he laid the ground of a consistent system to his stroke-types. the viewer then trusts that he knows what he’s doing, and are willing to be lead anywhere after that.

his drawings are really the best example, let me make some notations

there’s thought put into every stroke and line-- not to draw them “correctly”, but to draw them in a correct way. his drawings are the place where what he’s adding to the game really shines, i think:

hokusai was an _incredibly_ sophisticated illustrator few still with our fancy ‘lectronics and tutorials can hope to match. note the _purpose_ to each line, how each edge is unique to the internal system of the illustration. he was and still is so ahead of his time he even apparently coined the manga-classique beta flash before anyone else had the idea, too.

(that one’s just for fun.)

so japan had a head start on illustration over anything else. it really makes sense they’d pick up manga running and go all in on it; their visual culture already was based in firmly stylized but-inwardly-logically-consistent storytelling! they were there way before any of us! 

there’s a reason the western art world collectively lost their minds and went full japonisme over the ukiyo-e art. it was the same sort of cohesive styling picasso tried to crack into (when he was unwittingly getting handed [stolen iberian sculptures ](http://www.blogmuseupicassobcn.org/2011/09/on-iberian-heads-and-self-portraits/?lang=en)some rando swiped from the louvre) but fully realized in its function: to tell a hell of a story.

vwip back to manga and anime nowadays-- and light novels and grown-up novels in general, really, though from what little i’ve read is mostly murakami and, like, I Am A Cat so i can’t at all speak authoritatively there-- and we have an entertainment culture that seems completely happy to entertain the weirdest, most wild... bizarre adventures, let’s call them ;3.

which, well. it can seem weird from the outside, yes, but you’re not supposed to be _looking in_ from the outside. you’re supposed to be _stepping_ _in_ , and suspending all your personal logic in favor of the illustration’s internal one, if you’re going to properly enjoy it.

what seems off-the-wall to a lot of western audiences to me just reads like trust. the creator trusts the audience will suspend their disbelief wholesale and try to believe in the story like the creator does. the audience trusts the creator than no matter how weird and wild this rollercoaster gets, you can see just enough of the track up ahead to know a cliffhanger’s just the build-up to bringing it home.

in these turtling-times of blockbustersequelblockbustersequelfranchisemustbebroadaspossiblehaveyouSEENourbudgets, japan still ends up coming up with _new_ and _fun_ and _interesting_ stories not so much because they’re more innovative than any where else, but because they’re just given the space and trust to innovate.

and even if it all crashes and burns and the story gets away from them, well, a wild ride and dramatic crash-to-inferno is at least fucking _interesting._

hey western media gatekeepers!! weird is why you’re still talking ‘bout it!! you can even get more shit to mercilessly sequelxploit if you just let the weird shit ride! it’s clearly working for japan!! _try it_ _some time._


End file.
